Grade Clement Attlee's performance as UK Prime Minister

[Frozen Sky Ever Why]

A-

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

A-

[Intell]

A

[Blair]

A very strange figure- lead the most transformative government of the 20th Century but has received less attention and study than virtually all other post war PMs. He was much more of a chairman than a leader.

As Prime Minister I gave him an A-. He managed a lot of big egos very well in the Labour Government, although a fair amount of this was done to protect his own job- I wonder whether Morrison or Bevin would have done a better job as PM after ‘45.

He probably has the best economic record of any PM in that he transformed the economy without either kicking millions of people out of work, or leaving the economy too reliant on the financial sector. Likewise the reforms of his government in just 5 years were seriously impressive.

[IceAgeComing]

I wonder whether Morrison or Bevin would have done a better job as PM after ‘45.

At the time the leader of the Labour Party had to be re-elected when the PLP first met.  When very few people believed that Labour would win Morrison totally planned to push for the party leadership to displace Attlee.  This died very soon after the 1945 election but not instantly - I imagine that once it became crystal clear that a much larger PLP was not going to push out the leader who led them to a landslide victory they decided that to try would be pointless.

Indeed that's the very interesting thing about this whole thing: Attlee was in many ways an accidental Labour leader and certainly an accidental Prime Minister.  He was appointed in the aftermath of 1931 as a caretaker leader; someone to steady the ship and start the process of rebuilding and then someone else would come in when it looked like Labour was near to forming government.  Then the war got in the way and Attlee led Labour to a massive victory, so that generation that had been waiting for the right time to go for the top job were frozen out with Attlee's successor coming from the next generation.

As a Prime Minister; clearly the best that Britain ever had.  Not perfect but the creation of the modern welfare state and the National Health Service massively outweigh any of the bad bits.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

What were Attlee's mistakes?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

What were Attlee's mistakes?

The two biggest, objective blunders I can think of were the failure to prepare for the 1947 winter and the infamous Tanganyika groundnut scheme. We also withdrew from the Palestinian mandate and India during his term; which obviously caused a lot of problems down the line, but Labour can't really be blamed too much for those disasters - Palestine was an inherited disaster zone with no real solution between the feuding Jews and Arabs, and the blame for the infamously botched partition of India is shared between all sorts of people.

On a less objective level you can criticise him from the Left or the Right (depending on your personal opinions). Right-wingers would obviously oppose his nationalisation of industry, the creation of the NHS, the expansion of welfare etc. From the Left, you could (if you wanted to) criticise his foreign policy (largely Bevin's department) which essentially consolidated the strong Anglo-American alliance that exists to this day, the slow dismantling of the African portions of the Empire, the creation of the nuclear deterrent, the use of the military to end the Communist-supported 1947 dockers' strike etc.